utterly opinionated

Four hours and forty-one minutes outside Pittsburgh, anger slapped me in the face.  How ridiculous is this, I thought.  Only two hundred and thirty-three point eight miles in four hours and forty-one minutes?  If I were flying, I’d almost be in Paris.

While we fuss about better transportation inside our city, we are missing the boat (or the high-speed train).  Who cares about a slightly better connection between Downtown and Oakland?   We need a better connection between us and the rest of the world.  Right now it takes a startling twelve hours to go by train from Pittsburgh to New York.

A train that moves at just one hundred miles per hour would not only make it possible to get to New York, DC or Philadelphia faster, but would also open a flood of opportunities for Pittsburgh.  More jobs for those who live in our region, spread over a wider geographic area.  More opportunities for businesses located in Pittsburgh, with ready, fast connections to other places.  More.

Come on now.   Who’s working on this?

I was disappointed.   And then I wasn’t.

Every month Kim, Sara & I host a cityLIVE! event.  We are interested, as we believe our audience is, in understanding issues that impact our city and region.  We are interested in holding a forum that allows everyone to attend.  And we are most interested in nurturing a thoughtful exchange of ideas.

And so last night I was disappointed.  Some people came to our event with their minds made up.   They intended not to listen to others.  They did not intend to exchange ideas.  The resulting conversation was bitter and cruel.   “Answer the question” they shouted when they didn’t like the answer they were given.  Some even challenged the location of the venue, the legitimacy of the panel and the sincerity of the speakers.

Admittedly, the topic we chose was an emotional one — the fate of Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena.  Should the Igloo be demolished or should it be saved? This iconic building, a spectacular remnant of the Modern Movement, has a sordid history.  It was built where a vibrant neighborhood once was.  It left behind it a wake of blight and devastation as big as a Tsunami wave.  The Hill District, a predominately African American neighborhood, still lies in ruins sixty years later.  Lingering bitterness and mistrust accompany the physical devastation.  Mistrust of black for white.  Mistrust of everyone’s motives.  MISTRUST.  I did not understand this clearly until last night.

The event and the tense exchanges left me feeling unsettled, as if somehow the questions we’d asked, the issues we’d raised, the panel we had so carefully selected were irrelevant next to this much bigger issue.   I felt like an impostor in the room.  I heard clearly that I had no right as a white woman to have a say about the fate of the Igloo.

This thought rankled with me.

How can a civic building belong to one neighborhood or to one group of people?  How can it’s future lay in the hands of politicians who will soon be gone?  This building and it’s history is far bigger than that.  Its fate should be decided by Pittsburgh’s people – ALL of them.   As the event came to a close I felt very alone with these thoughts.

Then something remarkable happened. A steady stream of people came to thank me.  Emails followed.  How unfortunate that not everyone understood the nature of the event, they said.  The Igloo is important to us too.   We want an opportunity to be educated, to help decide.   We want to hear other perspectives .  We want to be involved.

So many voices, thinking just what I had.  And with every voice, the disappointment faded.

The next time someone tells you that Pittsburgh is losing population, yell at them.

For the first time in 19 years the Census reports that the number of people migrating into the Pittsburgh region in 2009 exceeded the number migrating out.  The remaining tiny population loss of 434 people last year is accounted for by more people dying than being born.  We are still a very old region.

So get busy.  Lets young up and shake that “really old” title as well.

cityLAB is going to pop Pittsburgh up in some other cities.  We are hosting a one-day creative event (a charrette) at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Architecture in Pittsburgh. Designers, architects, artists and wanna-be artists will work in teams to design a pop up that describes Pittsburgh best.

Not sure what a pop up is?   Come and find out at 10 am.

Creative and itching to design?  Stay on and we’ll assign you to a creative team.

Curious and got a point of view?  Come to the presentations at 2:30 pm and join in the critique.

Questions?   Email me at eve@citylabpgh.org.  We’ll be working in the College of Fine Arts Building at CMU, Room 214.

Everyone is welcome!

Our bus stop shelters are as dreary as January in Pittsburgh.  While they may be utilitarian they are quite pedestrian and uninspired.   The essential bus stop sign hasn’t even been integrated into the shelter.   It stands all alone, attached to a nearby post or pole, an afterthought.  What a shameful solution for a bus system that has more riders than most other cities in the US.

Santa Monica, on the other hand, is celebrating its bus system   Last year their Big Blue Bus Agency awarded Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects and Bruce Mau Design the Big Blue Bus Architectural and Branding Package.   These two internationally recognized firms were charged with the job of exploring how public transportation has the potential to cultivate, enrich and connect the community.

Their joyful solution, “The Blue Spots” takes the dreary out of bus stops.  Eventually, these flexible blue shelters will be implemented at 360 stops.

Ours or theirs?   You pick.

Everyone deserves to earn enough money to pay for their daily essentials.  On face value alone the proposed prevailing wage bill in Pittsburgh makes sense.  It speaks to the basic decency of employers and their willingness to take some responsibility for their employees lives.

As I understand it, the legislation ties real estate development dollars that the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority invests in a project to a guarantee that the developer pays prevailing wages to everyone involved, for evermore.  This means any business within a development must also comply.  No longer do the proponents of the bill want to trust employers to do the right thing.  They want to ensure that public dollars result in prevailing wages.

I so sympathize with this point of view.

But I’m going to land on the other side of this debate, and here’s why.

About five years ago I purchased the Liberty Bank Building on main street in East Liberty.  It sits in a neighborhood that at that time had many shuttered storefronts.  It had been vacant for ten years, and I lovingly called it “green”.  The building was covered inside with green mold.  The renovation that we embarked on was extensive and complicated.  Not much was left to save but the beautiful sandstone walls.  It is not a huge building but it was a huge financial undertaking.  It required the URA’s assistance, my life savings and an awful lot of time.  This is the sort of project you call “patient”.  I took this on because it matters to me that my projects make a difference in the long run and I was sure this one would.

In the early years it was almost impossible to find good tenants.  Tenants came and went, damaging the spaces and requiring more funds to repair them.  New potential tenants could not see the value of locating to this neighborhood.  It was tough.  Very tough.  My partners and I lost money.  Dollar Bank and the URA helped as much as any financial partner could.  They worked with us, unfailing, through the tough times until now, five years later, we are beginning to break even.

The due diligence that came along with city funds that were borrowed has also been burdensome but I believe a fair exchange.  Every year (amongst a sea of other reports) I compile a report of jobs created in the building.   Where once no-one was employed here, now sixty-one people come to work at the Liberty Bank Building every day.  I consider this a staggering success.  If I had to entice tenants to the building and require that they report their wage rates to me or the URA, I doubt that we would be at break even today.

Today, Rich Lord reported Rabbi Jami Gibson as rhetorically asking developers, “Why can’t you get by on the minimum profit?”.

This comment hits me hard in the gut.  I get by on LESS than minimum profit, Rabbi Gibson.  I’ve invested myself whole-heartedly into this neighborhood.  While the building I built may not require that everyone in it receives prevailing wage, it has helped to turn this neighborhood around, and brings far more jobs along with it than just inside the building alone.

Would I have tackled this building with the prevailing wages as an added mandated obligation?

No.

On January 12, cityLIVE! presents pop culture in the city of Pittsburgh.  Don’t you wonder what we are watching, reading and listening to – both good and bad?   We will discuss television, movies, printed material, the internet and music, and how pop culture goes from a niche phenomenon to a full-on pop cultural extravaganza. How have these influences changed Pittsburgh and the region, our population and our perception of ourselves in the larger world – both positive and negative, and is any of it within our control?

Our panel includes Pablo Garcia, from the Architecture Department at Carnegie Mellon; Emmai Alaquiva, of Ya Momz House; and Kathy Savitt, of Lockerz … and we will be moderated by Rob Rogers, editorial cartoonist and president of the ToonSeum.

Cocktails and conversation to follow.

Don’t let the cold weather keep you away.  Warm up with us.  RSVP here …

Last night’s cityLIVE event, 10 people. 3 minutes, was a rollicking success.  10 brilliant people with 10 brilliant ideas.

Our moderator, Chris Potter of the City Paper, conducted a survey to determine the “winner” by providing 5 pennies to each audience member and a styrofoam cup for each panelist, bedecked with their photo.    Late last night, Chris and his wife counted pennies.  He remarked that as an alternative-weekly journalist, a lot of his workdays end this way.

Top honors, or should I say, the most pennies go to Jon Rubin of the renowned East Liberty Waffle Shop.  Chris will make a donation in his name to Pittsburgh Promise.  The amount is TBD but he promises it will be less than the $10 million donated by UPMC, but more than the 41 cents dropped into Jon’s cup.

Jon amazingly crammed three big ideas into three little minutes.

First, he proposed to kick all of  Pittsburgh’s universities (classrooms, teachers, students and all) out of their buildings and relocate them throughout the entire city into storefronts, apartments, boats, and tree houses.  No longer would students be tempted to stay on their cloistered campuses. Writing classes would be conducted on coal barges,  a physics program in row houses, a business school at city hall and university lectures in backyards and street corners.  Imagine!

Second, he proposed super-gigantic sky fans to be installed around the perimeter of downtown Pittsburgh, blowing clouds away and creating a perpetual sunny zone over downtown to attract businesses, tourists and even more new residents.  Sunbathers would abound.  Suburban flight would be reversed and most importantly, the weather in the surrounding suburbs would actually become worse.

And last, but not least, John proposed exporting our greatest resource – the Steelers.  Our football team would become an international traveling soccer team in the off season.  Think of them as the Harlem Globetrotters of soccer.   The last World Cup had viewership of 30 billion people and John thinks we are missing out.  ”If we really want to call ourselves the city of champions, I suggest we take the big leap and go with the sort shorts” said John.

Last night was a celebration of the talent we have here in Pittsburgh.   It was a chance to hang loose and let ideas roll.  In every idea presented there was passion, conviction and truth.   Take any of them and push them forward and we could rebrand Pittsburgh in a completely unexpected way.

I’m voting for the city wide campus.  Short shorts on Steelers don’t seem quite right to me.

Back by popular demand!  We’ve gathered 10 more brilliant Pittsburgh minds to tell you about their funkiest, biggest, hairiest. most brilliant ideas for change.   Give us 30 minutes on December 9, and we’ll change the way you see the city at this cityLIVE! event.  Forget feasibility, funding or anything as ridiculous as consensus-building. We asked for ‘thought-provoking’ and ‘outside the box’.

You’ll want to meet our panelists after the show.  A glass of wine and a chat to polish off the evening. Hilary Robinson, dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University.  Raymar Hampshire, the young founder of sponsorchange.org.  Jon Rubin, CMU Art Professor and the man behind the wildly successful Waffle Shop.  Susan Everingham, the director of RAND’s Pittsburgh office.  Scott Faber, a developmental pediatrician at the Children’s Institute.  Alexi Morrissey, artist.   Priya Narasimhan from Carnegie Mellon’s Mobility Center and founder of YinzCam.  Janera Solomon of the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater.  LaVerne Baker Hotep from the Center for Victims of Violence and Crime.  Sean Jones of the Pittsburgh Jazz Orchestra.  They make for spicy conversation.

And to make sure that we don’t take ourselves too seriously, Chris Potter, the renowned editor of City Paper, will moderate with his unabashed and ascerbic charm.

You can read about last year’s event here. Greg Viktor will be writing a story again on it this year, in case you miss the event again.

But you won’t, will you?   See you there …

This lovely little city, Pittsburgh, is under siege.  Every day the media describes yet another crisis.  Eight more schools to close.  Library branches to be shuttered.  A court order to fix the water and sewer system.  Underfunded pension funds. Property and business taxes that are burdensome.  Disappearing bus stops.  Disappearing mail boxes.  And the latest, a mayor who wants to tax our local college students to balance the city’s books.

Someone has been asleep at the wheel.

It has been decades now since Pittsburgh’s population was halved.  Any sensible person would surely understand that half the people + the same number of services = disaster?

For the past decade the question in my head has become louder, more strident.   Where is the leadership who will say it the way it is?  Where is the leadership that will prepare it’s citizens for reality?

A leader should look like this.  She should prepare her city’s citizens for the strategy that must be thought through – a shrinking city strategy.  She should find ways to consolidate the city’s citizenry, to consolidate services.   She should have the courage to say that upfront.  She should focus on how to grow the city.  And she should share the plan so that her citizens will understand that there will be pain, but there is also hope. She should know that cities are the future and that Pittsburgh will grow again.

Neither the head of the library system nor the superintendent of the public schools are to blame for the situations they inherited.    Audits, anger and outrage will not change that fact.

Streamlining city government:  What can we do NOW?

City County consolidation is a big, top down idea. We’ve worked on it locally for years now and are told there are many valuable efficiencies to gain from such a consolidation.

In the meantime, while we are waiting, are there ways to streamline government services from the bottom up? Should we wait for the big prize, or should we be chipping away at consolidating smaller chunks that may eventually add up to the big prize?

On November 4, a panel of experts will present and discuss their ideas for effectively streamlining government services today at the latest  cityLIVE! Pittsburgh event.  Our panel includes Kathleen McKenzie, deputy county manager for Allegheny County;  Moe Coleman, professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and Urban Studies;  Sala Udin, president and CEO of Coro Center for Civic Leadership; and moderating will be Laura Ellsworth, partner at Jones Day.

Sign up here and show your love!

Will we always be second best?

Over the last month I have been corresponding with a young man from Tokyo.  He will be moving to Pittsburgh for a job, with wife and baby daughter in tow.   He is in fact an American  but has lived abroad for years now.  He believes that America can offer a better life for his family.

But apparently not Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh is his entry point back into the country.  He already has a timeline firmly implanted in his mind for the length of his stay here.  Three years and then on to a better place.

My first reaction when he told me this was disappointment.  But Chris Briem set me straight.    He said  “I bet places like Manhattan or Boston, or places one might think are ‘not second best’ are full of transitory people who will not stay.”.    And of course, he’s right.

Just last month the Wall Street Journal’s selected their 10 top-rated Next Youth-Magnet Cities.  Washington DC tied for first place with Seattle.   Washington DC has an enduring brand as a place of transition, full of people who don’t stay long.   And yet, it is, according to the WSJ the number one pick for today’s youth.   Interesting.

If a region has churn, according to Chris, then it is attracting those mobile workers who have the most options on where they go.  And this is a good sign.  For decades now, the region has been moribund, unable to attract new workers,   For decades now we have been number one in weird statistics like the highest percentage of people who have lived in their current home or current county.   Now we have companies like Westinghouse who are growing so rapidly that they may be the provider for the churn we are looking for.   Westinghouse alone is looking to fill some 600 positions they have open.  

If the city is going to expand and grow then this is something we should learn to expect.  It will be hard to forget the last 3 decades. Then, a person who left was not necessarily replaced.  Now we should expect more people to come and leave and be replaced by others.  New people, with new families and new ideas.

The day after he left Pittsburgh after his first brief visit here, my Tokyo friend wrote to me. “Strangely enough” he wrote “I miss the time I spent in Pittsburgh.”   

Churn or not, I had to smile.

Is the rush out of Pittsburgh finally over?

Was there ever really a rush?

Every year since 1995 Christopher Briem has updated his annual report on migration trends in and out of the Pittsburgh region.   Every year an average of 13% of the population has migrated out the Pittsburgh Metro Statistical Area and almost the same number has migrated in. 

While in the past the local media has focused on the 13% who choose to leave, Pittsburgh is apparently attractive enough for almost the same number to choose to come.  Just a sliver has separated these two numbers in past years.  For every 10 that leave, 9 others find reason to come, a mere 10% imbalance.  This was never a profound imbalance but just a slow leak that eventually had to be plugged.  That moment has now come.

For me, this year’s report marks the beginning of the end.  The decline of net population loss has been steady since 2005.   In 2007 – 2008, there was a net population loss of just 738 people.   That is just 0.25% of the population.  Nothing.  Nobody worth talking about.    

Nothing worth talking about, except for this.

In past years the local media has trumpeted Pittsburgh’s migration misfortunes loudly, focusing on those leaving instead of those coming.  I suppose because this year’s loss number is so pitifully small it isn’t much of a story.  This year, the first with good news, the media are painfully silent.

But for me, this is a story worth talking about.   It is another indicator of Pittsburgh’s transformation.  The point is this.   We are healthy.   A lot of people are finding a reason to come here.  Let’s keep that in mind.  And let’s keep them coming.

I can hardly wait for the 2008 – 2009 numbers!

As part of an annual its North American Tour Day to call attention to modernist design, DOCOMOMO US has designated Pittsburgh a Tour Day city. The tour will focus on key post-WW II buildings in the Golden Triangle, starting at the original ALCOA building at Mellon Square, including Miens Van Der Rohe’s Mellon Hall at Duquesne University and ending at the Portal Bridge at Point State Park. The tour will be led by architectural and preservation professionals.

Pittsburgh Moderns organized by the Pittsburgh Chapter of DOCOMOMO, is a group of architects, historians, and artists.  The tour is free and open to the public.  

This is a great opportunity to learn about a group of buildings that make Pittsburgh’s Downtown quite distinctive.

The G20 protesters wound their way through Downtown Pittsburgh this afternoon. The grand finale to a grand show.

All is quiet this morning. Police are purposefully assembling for the G20 protest march that is expected to come through Downtown Pittsburgh at 2 pm this afternoon. Some small groups of protesters are scattered here and there. People are gathering and lounging on the jersey barriers. It’s a strange scene – armed forces and tourists, side by side.

Today, something fantastic happened. Something I have always dreamed of. We closed the streets of Downtown Pittsburgh to cars, and bicycles took over. Now, I know that was not the intent of the G20 security measures. But it was certainly an interesting, and positive, side effect.

It was quiet and peaceful. It was fun exploring the city. It was a chance for people who normally won’t fight the traffic to enjoy the incredible downtown we have.

Maybe we can plan for this more often? Minus the police of course.

It’s 3:10 pm.  The temperature has definitely changed …

Audrey Russo, president and CEO of the Pittsburgh Technology Council, is taking a vacation.   At my loft.  Downtown.  Half a block from the epicenter.

You may wonder how this came about.

About a week ago Audrey, who has media credentials for the G20, realized how difficult it would be to come and go to downtown, so I offered a bedroom.   When I met up with Audrey yesterday afternoon, she was already weary.  She had started the day early with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google.  She had put on two events with him, and there was networking still to do at the Welcome World event.

That evening, back at my loft, after downing a beer and some carrot cake, Audrey went to bed.  She didn’t resurface until 9:30 am.

The G20 has turned our downtown home into an oasis of silence.  It is surprisingly peaceful here right now.  Liberty Avenue is closed to traffic.  The sounds we normally hear — buses, cars and horns — are non-existent..  The silence is broken only by occasional chants in the distance.

Great place for a vacation.

The police are preparing themselves.  The G20 resistance group will be marching into town this afternoon.   They are gathering at Arsenal Park in Lawrenceville.  They have no permit and so are an unknown quantity.  

We’ve heard they mean business.  Let’s hope the march is peaceful.

From my window.  Yesterday and today.

This afternoon I saw the first G20 demonstration at my front door.  It was very orderly.  It was very calm.  

It was not the one I expected.

Black cars.  Lots of black cars.  Men in black inside the black cars.  Black fence too.

Black is global.